According to Human Rights Watch in a 2001 report[1], slavery impersonates sexual relationships. Rape victims are often intimidated into actively pretending to consent to the acts, to the point of becoming slaves and the literal property of their rapists. This occurs in both male and female prisons.

Prospective slaveholders even use intimidating innuendo which the prospective slave submits to, thus hiding even from the enslaver themselves the coercive nature of the acts. The slave might not even realize that they themselves are being coerced, because they may be enslaved when defaulting on a debt and because they consider themselves transformed into a homosexual[2]. In fact, the report tells the story of an inmate coerced in this way[3]. "Consent in prison" is argued to be inherently illusory.

Prison sexuality, usually thought of as non-homosexual or situationally-homosexual, shows quite similar dominance traits to those of apes, creating similar relationship structures. Similar animal-based behaviors are widely understood as being part of human nature, and hence sexual relationships tend to follow universal archetypes, which manifest themselves in all aspects of human culture and behavior.

In many cases among men, the insertive partner is not viewed as being gay, and the receptive partner (who may or may not be consenting) is called a woman, a "bitch," or a "punk". In the United States in particular, rape in prisons is a major problem, and may be perpetuated by inmates who do not see themselves as homosexual, and uses the act more to assert control or dominance. A man who has been raped, or who has had receptive intercourse, is often seen as less masculine and hence a target for future rape and other violence. According to a recent study, 7% of male U.S. prison inmates had reported being a victim of prison rape.

Among men, the receptive partner may be protected by the insertive partner from rape by others, and possibly from fights, and some heterosexuals enter relationships to reduce the number of men they must have sex with. Such men are said to be "riding with" their respective insertive partners. The same can be seen in female prisons, where an unwilling woman who normally would not engage in sex with another woman would do so for the sake of protection, to prevent forced sex or rape by several other female inmates. In cases of this sort, the female or male inmate is choosing one dominant partner over many partners, in a sense due only out of their desire for self preservation. In almost all prison relationships, with few exceptions, in both female and male prisons, one participant is dominant and the other is submissive.

However, this in no way indicates that sex inside the prison systems are only non-consensual. In both female and male prison facilities, many homosexual or bisexual inmates enter into relationships with other inmates for varying reasons.